Bernard Mandeville's social aesthetics

This paper aims to show the theoretical pattern underlying Mandeville's reflections on society and politics. In many passages of his work, Mandeville refers to classical aesthetic categories such as harmony, proportion, and balance; he even considers the flaws of social structure and attempts to explain them by analogy with the work of art. Such aesthetic principles are obviously revisited and adapted to the peculiar system and social criticism expressed by Mandeville, who nevertheless seems well aware of the main themes debated by art theorists in the first decades of the 18th century.